Evidence of meeting #54 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was studies.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
What have you been told as to why such data is not being collected today?
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
It's—
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Is it because it's said to be provincial jurisdiction? Is it because it's too costly? Is it because the government has something to hide?
I have no idea.
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
I don't know why they are not collecting that data.
Adjunct Investigator, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, As an Individual
It's something which should be captured from public health records. And—
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Yes, thank you. You'll appreciate that time is so limited.
Dr. Blank, you started by saying that Health Canada was not measuring the right parameters, that it was focusing on temperature but not looking at the biological parameters. I think you said something to that effect. Health Canada tells us in this fact sheet that I just mentioned that they do. They say:
....Health Canada scientists consider all peer-reviewed scientific studies (which includes thermal, non-thermal, and biological effects)....
They claim they are doing what you say they should be doing.
Prof. Martin Blank
Well, I don't see that.
They didn't elaborate what the biological effects were and what the non-thermal effects were. The only one they referred to was the...I forget the particular ones they had about non-thermal effects.
The fact is that they didn't refer to the stress response, which I think is the body's first line of defence in connection with a lot of stimuli that are present in nature.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
If there is a stress protein created, as you've suggested, or that some studies that you and Dr. Goodman refer to suggest, the implication seems to be that the creation of stress proteins is a serious thing.
Does that necessarily follow—?
Prof. Martin Blank
That's the body's reaction.
You'd never know that because this was not written by biologists. I'm amazed that at the beginning of the report they put in a word for a chemical engineer, another engineer to come on board. They didn't even mention that they need one biologist. They need somebody there who understands what's going on at the level of a cell.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Here we have your analysis, which has been very clearly presented by both of you. Toward the end of your recommendation, you refer to Dr. Lerchl, from Bremen, who has in the past not been alive to these concerns, but who has recently been concluding that there is a concern. Yet, as recently as March 13, Health Canada puts out to the Canadian public a fact sheet saying that there are no concerns here.
This is very hard for Canadians to understand. It seems that our regulators are not giving this the attention that this deserves. I say “seems” because I'm not a scientist. I have to rely on what they conclude and what you two are asserting.
Prof. Martin Blank
Well, we have been carrying this message out. I'm not a shrinking violet, as you can tell from my presentation. I call things the way I see them. I've published a lot of papers. I was president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society. I've organized symposia on the precautionary principle. I've been active in this and I've made the message go out.
My papers have been published as well. The fact that they have been ignored, that's on the other side of the ledger. These guys don't want to hear it. Why? You may inquire into that as well, because that's an interesting question. The fact is that they have ignored it.
I actually pointed it out when I presented at an earlier review, when the draft of the report was being considered. I made a presentation then and said the same thing, more or less, and it just was not mentioned. The fact that they ignored the papers by Dr. Goodman and me.... We've published many papers on this subject, and it's a very important thing, if I may say so. I mean, this is a basic reaction of cells, and especially when you're interested in harm that's coming to cells, this should be mentioned. It should at least get a footnote or get a reference in there that we looked at it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Ms. Moore, you're going to get a B.C. minute, and that's about 45 seconds.
NDP
Christine Moore NDP Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
Okay.
In your opinion, should we establish a specific limit for exposure to radio frequency for pregnant women?
Prof. Martin Blank
I think pregnant women deserve a special category. The thing is that they may be classified with the rest of the adults, but the growing fetus in utero, although it's a small target, nevertheless is a far more important target. The fact is that any danger that occurs there will be magnified manyfold. I think pregnant women really need a separate category, and a far more protective one.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Thank you very much.
Well: you've got my attention very thoroughly. Thank you very much to our witnesses for being here with us.
Dr. Blank, you were talking about bioelectric medicine, if I heard that right, and the effect on cells. Cells are something I'm very interested in. Are you familiar with MENS therapy, microelectric neuromuscular stimulation?
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
It was popular for athletic injuries and so on, starting in about the nineties. Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson, and other sprinters of that era were using it for athletic injuries.
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
That's one experience using that. They're very low-frequency treatments. You're talking about 50 to 100 microamps. It's low amperage, microamperage, but it's also low frequency, like 0.4 to 0.7 hertz. Of course, when you have very low frequency, you have very long wavelengths, which seem to have a very profound physiological impact.
At any rate, you have my attention with what you're suggesting here about cellular impacts. I just want to read one short quote about MENS therapy, just off the Internet here:
In 1991, the German scientists Dr. Erwin Neher and Dr. Bert Sakmann shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their development of the patch-clamp technique that allows the detection of minute electrical currents in cell membranes. This method allowed the detection of 20 to 40 types of ion channels that allow positive or negatively charged ions into and out of the cells and confirmed that electrical activity is not limited to nerve and muscle tissue.
So now we're talking about what's going on in the cell. I think you raised something extremely important on what's going on in the cell. You would be familiar, from your work, with a lot of the interest today in apoptosis. There's a lot of interest in that in cancer therapy
Are you familiar with that term, sir?
Conservative
James Lunney Conservative Nanaimo—Alberni, BC
Programmed cell death, exactly. It may be that in the body, with 80 trillion to 100 trillion cells, we have up to one million cells per second going through this process of cell destruction, programmed cell death, and recycling without damaging neighbouring cells. It's an amazing phenomenon. Of course there's a lot of interest in apoptosis, because in cancer research now, we find tumour cells are full of an anti-apoptotic protein of several types, and viruses are able to introduce this kind of anti-apoptotic protein. It's key to understanding what's going on in the cells.
Does any of your research indicate that in fact when cells are stressed—you mentioned stress proteins, the cell response to stress—the stress response includes triggers that may in fact induce apoptosis in the cells, which can in fact trigger tumours under the right condition?
Prof. Martin Blank
The answer is that I don't know of anything, but there are about 20 different stress proteins that have been identified, and not all of them have been tagged as to what their specific function is.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were something like that, although cells and their enemies are very clever. They are constantly fighting with each other. You invent a cure and Mother Nature thinks of some way in which the cure can be circumvented. There are all kinds of possibilities.